


The Origin of Love

by fictionalfoibles



Category: Dragon Ball
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-01
Updated: 2019-02-01
Packaged: 2019-10-20 07:59:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17618543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fictionalfoibles/pseuds/fictionalfoibles
Summary: He needed her genius to make him stronger. Sure, he could use her father instead, but killing her would certainly cause more problems than it was worth. For one, her friends would come to avenge her death, and he would have to waste time dealing with them. Kakarot would get involved, and at that point he was nowhere near able to touch the third-rate warrior. He would have to live with the crying and blubbering of her family as he demanded they keep him in comfort and strength-amplifying technology. It would have been more trouble than it was worth.Those were the reasons he told himself as to why he wouldn't murder Bulma Briefs.It was certainly an easier and cleaner lie than the complicated, ill-understood truth.~Or, Bra wants to go to the mall. Trunks wants to go on a date. Vegeta just wants to understand how his life ended up like this.





	The Origin of Love

**Author's Note:**

> Hi. I am a huge sap and wrote this because I have feelings about Vegeta's character development.
> 
> (Is the title a reference to Hedwig? Not intentionally, but it fits the vibe of the story anyway. lol)

"Daddy! I'm going to the mall!" his daughter sing-songed, clear as bell to his sharp ears. 

No, no, no, just _NO_. He scrubbed his teeth faster at the bathroom sink. 

"Daddy?" Bra called after a moment of silence, then shrugged. "Guess he doesn't care. Oh well. I'm off!" She said, the sound of the front door of their home apartments opening, slowly, as if giving her father time to respond. He did not disappoint. 

Vegeta spat out his toothpaste in a hurry, his voice nearly choked by the minty cleaning substance he had yet to clear from the back of his mouth. "Trunks! Go with your sister!"

"I have plans!" his ungrateful son shot back from another room down the hall. 

Vegeta growled. Unpleasant whelp. Not for the first time did Vegeta wish he hadn't distanced himself from his son from the future when the parentage of the time traveling boy was revealed to him. 

Bulma had just given him a son then, and, like one of her broken machines, Vegeta's mind was having trouble computing the basic fact of Trunks' existence, let alone the complex notion of fatherhood. In that area, he was woefully uneducated. And to suddenly be bombarded with an almost full-grown half-Saiyan offspring needing his attention, wanting his love? It was too much to process. 

Though they spent a year in the Hyperbolic Time Chamber together, it wasn't enough to gain more than a rough understanding of the boy. And most of that time Vegeta had isolated himself from his son, who had fathomed the depths of the Time Chamber alone, abandoned by the father he wished so desperately to know. But Vegeta couldn't allow himself the vulnerability of caring for someone. He didn't know where to even begin trying.

But that time with Trunks _did_ change something fundamental within him. Watching the boy be struck down by Cell allowed some synapse in his brain to turn on finally. It was slow-going.

The boy from the future reappeared years after the Buu fiasco as a broken man, his world once more in peril from a foe beyond his reckoning. Vegeta hoped he had shown the young man another side of himself then, as they fought together once more. A better version of himself. As a man. As a father. 

Future Trunks, as always, was reserved and well-mannered, dedicated and serious. He'd been beset by a lifetime of responsibility, by guilt over things he couldn't control, and by a body count too staining to scrub from his soul. In many ways, but not all, he reminded Vegeta of himself, of the man he used to be before coming to Earth. Frieza's obedient, skilled lapdog. Always doing what he needed to do to survive.

Vegeta, though, had turned that inner anguish outward into merciless destruction, while locking all softer emotion down into a twisting pit of fire deep inside, where it was never to be explored or even acknowledged. Trunks had used his pain to become a better man than Vegeta had any hope to be.

Full of rage, yet righteous. Terrified, yet unyielding and valiant. Somehow Trunks had taken what Vegeta considered flaws and turned them into extraordinary feats of virtue, even if it took Vegeta far too long to understand the value of said virtue. 

But when the man left again, father and son had parted as equals. Understood by each other. 

Vegeta thought _his_ boy, the Trunks of _this_ time, could stand to be a little more like the boy from the future.

The Trunks of this time grew into a spoiled man, powerful and prideful, and too much like the man Vegeta had become by the time he came to Earth. Though in Trunks' younger years Vegeta could scare him into good behavior with a disapproving glance, these days it was only a tongue-lashing from his mother, persistent badgering from his sister, or Vegeta _literally_ beating him into the ground during a sparring session to resolve a disagreement, that could persuade him to alter his behavior or plans.

"Well _now_ your plans are to take your sister to the blasted mall!" Vegeta spat, with a venom in his voice not felt in his heart. 

That secret he would take to the grave (and if he had anything to say about it, for all eternity in Other World as well): he loved this life.

"But Trunks is _so_ lame! I don't want to go with him!" Bra groused from afar. "Dad~dy!" his daughter whined. 

"It's Saturday! I have a _date_!" Trunks said almost simultaneously. 

Vegeta ground his teeth. Maybe love was too strong a word. Maybe he only slightly _tolerated_ this life.

"Why does everyone have to scream all the time in this house?" Vegeta heard his wife cut in with a screech, the irony of her booming voice interjecting lost on her. The unassuming flat square on the wall just above the light switch, the same color as the wall, only with a more pronounced sheen to it than its matte surroundings, lit up with her face. She was in her lab coat, through it was early enough in the day that she was likely just in her study a few doors down from their bedroom, pouring over schematics to her latest project. He couldn't tell--her annoyed face took up the entire screen, blocking any view of her surroundings. Vegeta almost flinched as if he she were right in front of him, poised for attack. "Can't any of you use the house coms like civilized people? Ugh, I'm _done_ with you Saiyans!" she berated, and her image suddenly cut out.

Vegeta smirked. That was officially the 3,000th time he had overheard his wife saying she was "done with you Saiyans!". 

He was no stranger to sarcasm (or hyperbole, or impassioned speech of any kind), a connotative inflection that, though not at all native to the brutally honest Saiyan language, made up nearly every other sentence in the ice-jinn clan's cruel tongue. 

That small slip in understanding was partly to blame for how his people allowed themselves initially to become part of Frieza's Planet Trade Organization. Though their language implants allowed his words and promises clear enough translation, the barely-below-the-surface lies never registered with the Saiyans, so eager to prove their skills in battle. They fought hard to create a life on Vegetasei, which was never their native land. The Saiyan people and their king knew the value of aligning themselves with that galactic empire, whose reach was nearly endless. And for a time the Saiyans were blissfully unaware of the perils of their own hubris. 

Until it was too late.

Vegeta soon learned how to control his speech, his facial expressions, even his emotions. It was subterfuge for survival. It was how he managed to be one of the last few remaining Saiyans in Frieza's employ, long after his value as the Saiyan prince had dwindled to nothing. He learned how to speak Frieza's language, learned how to turn his hot blood cold, so that nothing could touch him. Nothing would break him--not fists, and certainly not words.

After he arrived on Earth it was clear that communication was going to be a problem. Not only did Earthlings have thousands of languages and means of expression, but even the most commonly spoken tongues held inconsistencies that were skillfully exploited by local natives, and made conversational speech clumsy to non-natives. Especially off-worlders with limited capacity to digest the intricacies of emotional language beyond sinister sarcasm.

Every turn of phrase spoken against him seemed like a declaration of war. Every minor human annoyance directed at him weighed heavily on his pride. The humans were so easy to understand in some ways, so simple in their silly desires and lives, and yet were a puzzle he could spend an entire lifetime working on and never have a chance at solving.

But, over the years, he was beginning to understand.

And it started with her.

The others were more direct. Obvious. Earth's Special Forces saw him as a threat, something to be watched and guarded against. 

For all her genius, her brilliance, his wife never understood the danger he posed to her. After Namek, after tentatively aligning himself with the others only to defeat Frieza, Bulma didn't see him as a threat anymore. She immediately saw him as one of her wayward boys, physically unparalleled in strength but ridiculously unprepared for real life. 

He couldn't understand her at first. Regarded her something like a powerless Frieza. She seemed to effortlessly command some of the world's strongest fighters, him included, with only that golden tongue. She never missed a beat. She regarded him coolly, halfheartedly, and yet with a strange intensity that drove him mad, finally leading him to approach her in a way that would have been inconceivable to him even a year prior. 

The first time she had uttered the phrase, it was just before the cell-games. She had rolled her eyes as he and his future son came out from the Hyperbolic Time Chamber, and she gifted him and the others with Saiyan armor she made herself. He had almost spent two years on Earth at that point--not including the time in the chamber or out in space searching for Kakarot after the battle with Frieza--and still her words and subsequent actions made little sense to him. Of course he understood it, to some degree, but it still didn't make _sense_. 

She fussed over her older son, paying little attention to Vegeta, as was their dynamic at that point, having yet found the time or the language necessary to solidify what they were to each other, if anything. Then she looked over at him and scoffed, eyes narrowed in a scolding manner. "Gosh you both are ridiculous, beating each other up for a whole year! I hope you actually got to _talk_ to each other in there. Whatever, I'm totally done with you crazy Saiyans! Oh, by the way I brought some stuff you might need for the fight with Cell."

He had made the attempt to translate her words in his mind into Saiyago and then back to her native tongue:

"To go to such extremes in preparation for battle is frustrating and vexing to me as a non-warrior, however, I support your endeavors with this gift."

It didn't exactly sound right.

She was utterly incomprehensible. But, maybe, so was he. They were both complicated creatures. Bulma's relationships were based around fond, almost motherly, feelings she had for the people in her life, which even included her parents, who, while loving, were detached from the world at large in their own unique ways. This motherly fondness even extended to her half-wit weakling of an ex-boyfriend, who she scolded more often than she seduced.

He realized, much later, far and away past the madness of Buu and a few years after his baffling marriage to the woman, that their relationship was different, right from the start.

Again, in many ways, he already knew this. It was the reason he decided to stay on Earth and make her his mate, or wife, as the humans called it. He could understand why she was so appealing to him, though putting it into words was often a complicated process, even in his own head. But he never quite understood what she saw in _him_. 

She showed some of that same incomprehensible fondness and that that same bewildering temper she used on her lost boys on him, but there was something else there entirely as well. At first he thought she replaced her fear of him with hate. Her words held a particular bite he was unaccustomed to. A fire was kindled within where there was only coldness and sarcasm and dark, echoing laughter, before. Her words, careless and brash, would bounce around in his head days afterward, annoying him to no end. He spat that fire back at her, and she threw it back in kind. It grew larger and larger between them, like a ki ball feeding off of both energies. 

He had never hated a human more in his life.

Oh, he hated Frieza, beyond a doubt. The ruiner of his legacy, the insanguinator of his bloodline and his people, the nightmare lurking in every pleasant dream. There was every reason to hate the despicable creature. He hated Nappa for his stupidity, for ruining what was possibly his one chance at revenge. He hated--oh, how he hated--Kakarot, for being able to do what he was never able to do. For easily gaining the victories Vegeta so desperately sought. For being always the first when Vegeta always lagged behind. 

But Earthlings...humans...they should have been beyond his notice. Even the other warriors, aside from the Namekian and Kakarot's brat, had negligible power levels, and he couldn't be bothered with them. Humans were laughable creatures, if he even found them worthy of a good laugh. They were like ants crawling over his shoes, like gnats buzzing about his ears. They were nothing. Not even the criminals or cut-throats of Earth could produce a candle's worth of Vegeta's own furious burning ire, wrathful and godlike as the sun. 

But that woman...

He _hated_ her.

She twisted that fire up inside him, the one he vowed he would never touch or think about. The fire that could consume him if he let it. 

She didn't fear him. She went so far as to put her trust in him. She welcomed into her home a tiger and then treated it like a mewling kitten. 

But she didn't hold back from laughing at him, from insulting and berating him when she didn't get her way. No one else on the damned planet had drawn his attention in such a manner, and he burned with a rage he couldn't touch. 

He needed her genius to make him stronger. Sure, he could use her father instead, but killing her would certainly cause more problems than it was worth. For one, her friends would come to avenge her death, and he would have to waste time dealing with them. Kakarot would get involved, and at that point he was nowhere near able to touch the third-rate warrior. He would have to live with the crying and blubbering of her family as he demanded they keep him in comfort and strength-amplifying technology. It would have been more trouble than it was worth.

Those were the reasons he told himself as to why he wouldn't murder Bulma Briefs. 

It was certainly an easier and cleaner lie than the complicated, ill-understood truth. 

He knew desire. His hyper-sensitive Saiyan senses could almost smell it on her, even with the ice in her voice, her cutting jabs at everything from his height to his hygiene. He wanted to kill her, and he also wanted...her.

Five years after the Cell games, he finally managed to put into words what he wanted from her. He made the traditional Saiyan vow to her, to _honor, defend, and retaliate_. Without missing a beat, she demanded a ring and a marriage as compromise. 

Every time she said she was "done with Saiyans," he knew, now, that she meant the exact opposite. It was their own language, their own understanding. Though their children had an inkling of their parents' particular brand of affection--especially when a heated argument elevated to screaming and then...well. 

The others never understood. Though perhaps Kakarot did. Chi-Chi proved time and again to have that similar fire, enough to tempt the third-rate warrior, and more than most Earth women. Bulma was cut from similar cloth, and it drew the attention of both Earth-bound Saiyans.

But the others...

He'd note the looks on their faces, wondering how the two could possibly be together, and why they'd even want to be, with that fire consuming the both of them. To anyone outside their little family, they were deemed a "love/hate situation." Bulma had to explain the term to him once. It rankled, how reductive humans were. But once again, the ants hardly managed to move him from mild annoyance to anything deeper. They would never understand, and that was fine. Like he needed the approval of his relationship from a pathetic inferior race. Even her friends, and the men he fought alongside in battle, hardly understood. 

It wasn't hate, though, that he felt. It took a long time to work that one out. He never even hated Kakarot or Nappa, just what he thought they stood for. 

Bulma was a true test of survival, in every sense. If everything in his life had been a battle, she was the war. He wanted to fight and win, once and for all, this time. He wanted to be victorious. He wanted to destroy her as much as he also wanted, more than anything, to have her honor him, defend him, retaliate for him and against him, every moment of their lives.

He couldn't put words to it then, but he wanted her _love_ , too.

He saw in her his equal and opposite, a mirror that too clearly showed himself, and the man he could become through her. It was frightening, it was maddening, and he fought it for as long he could before he waved his flag in surrender and ended the war. 

It seemed like a war lost. But after the battle with Buu...after _actually_ losing her...losing all of them...he finally knew what true loss felt like. 

He was never so grateful in his entire life, to have a _third_ chance to get it right. 

Even if it meant inane, anemic battles every day with the most annoying creatures he ever had the misfortune to call his family.

Vegeta huffed, walking over to the flat comm device on the wall and pressing a button. "Trunks," he stated. It was a command which made the sleek machine beep. After a moment, the machine beeped again before his son's face filled the screen. "Yeah?" the young man replied, clearly annoyed, but his coppery skin couldn't hide the slight blush on his cheeks, likely from embarrassment at having been called out by his mother. 

"Accompany your sister to the mall. Now."

"Why can't you take her?" 

Vegeta grumbled. "I promised your mother I'd be in her lab today. She's developing a new serum of some kind, and I'm going to be her test subject, apparently."

Trunks tried to reign in his amusement, knowing it wouldn't help him escape his familial obligation if he laughed at his father's plight. "I see. But can't Grandma go with her instead?"

Panchy Briefs certainly did love shopping. But that was neither here nor there. "She needs a suitable escort, regardless of your grandmother's presence."

Trunks groaned. 

"I don't need an 'suitable escort'! I can handle myself," said a voice at the door. Bra stood, hands on her hips, glaring at her father and her brother on the screen in turn. "Daddy, you always think some guy is going to mess with me. But so what? Not like I can't beat them up. I won't get hurt." She pouted. "I just thought you might want to go with me is all. But now I see how it is. You're mom's lab rat today. Boo." 

Trunks on screen rolled his eyes and wisely didn't say what he was thinking--how he could never get away with mocking his father like that without an ass-kicking. Vegeta hardly ever trained with Bra, but it wasn't because she was weaker than her brother, or because she was female. Most humans had a very odd sense of masculine and feminine traits, as if women could never be physically stronger than men or men emotionally weaker than females, even though, like himself, they encountered reminders to the contrary almost daily. Another reason why Vegeta despised this planet he unfortunately called home and its odd conflicting beliefs.

But Bra reminded him too strongly of his Bulma, from coloring to fashion sense to whip-smart attitude, that he pulled his punches too often during a spar, his mind tricking him into thinking his impossibly strong half-Saiyan child was instead his brilliant but fragile human wife. It happened too often for him to train her outright like he did with Trunks since he was a small child, and he felt ashamed he never gave her the opportunity to prove her fighting prowess like Trunks.

Mostly, though, he discontinued her training beyond the now-and-again spar because Bra was powerful, and picked up new techniques like a master in the art of war, never needing much direction. It was becoming a trend with the demi-Saiyans of Earth. 

Bulma mentioned something once about the ratio of Saiyan to Human genetic material causing certain mutations to exceed the parameters of typical Saiyan strength--the reason why Trunks and Goten were able to go Super Saiyan before ten years of age (and level two...and three...), and why Pan, only a quarter Saiyan, was quite possibly the most powerful of the younger demi-Saiyans, with her base form in a fight-mode rivaling Vegeta's unguarded Super Saiyan form. Even now with the ability to ascend to the level of the Gods, the idea that a demi-Saiyan brat and descendant of a third-class warrior could beat her prince in a hypothetical duel to the death pushed Vegeta every day to stay on top of his game.

And Bra was proving to be every bit as Saiyan-lethal and every bit as emotionally human as all the other demi-Saiyan offspring. 

"He's not worried about _you_ , Bra," Trunks said, breaking Vegeta's thought. "He's worried you might accidentally kill whoever messes with you," he said, sounding almost bored, but with a proud little smirk on his face that he saved only for his little sister, which she almost always took as teasing. Vegeta seemed to be the only one who could translate that expression correctly. 

Bra gasped. "I would never--y-you're so _stupid_ , Trunks!" she yelled, flustered. "I can't believe you both don't trust me. I'm done with you stupid Saiyan men!" Well, _that_ was a new one, definitely picked up from her mother. Vegeta wanted to chuckle at her rage, but thought better of it. "I'm almost fifteen and I can't do anything! It's so embarrassing! You guys treat me so badly!" She sniffed. "I break _one_ guy's arm _one_ time and suddenly I'm the bad guy! It's so unfair!" Yes, she certainly inherited her mother's dramatics.

Trunks was rubbing his head now, probably fending off a headache. "Look, I guess I can take you later after my lunch date--"

"Why don't I just fly to the mall, like I planned, and meet with Pan and Marron, like I planned, so we can go Christmas shopping for you ungrateful losers?" 

Trunks' expression seemed to freeze for a moment, and Vegeta could almost see the sweat dripping down his face in the split second it took for him to respond, as coolly as he could, though it fooled absolutely no one. "Marron's going...?"

"And Pan," Bra smirked, knowing her brother too well.

"Right, right," Trunks said hurriedly. "Um..."

Vegeta growled, impatient. Bulma would give him in earful if he wasn't down in the lab in a half-hour, and he still needed to eat lunch, and it was getting too late in the day for this kind of nonsense. 

"Just cancel your silly date, boy, and you'll get out of training on Sunday."

Trunks blinked. "Wha--really? Oh. Uh. Okay. I mean, that's really lame that I'd have to cancel my date to make sure the brat can control herself in public, but...I _guess_ it's okay." Trunks said, finishing softly. 

"In that case, I guess I should tell Marron she doesn't have to join us--" Bra said with an evil little smirk.

" _What?_ " Trunks snapped.

"Oh yeah. Videl wanted to come but couldn't, and since Pan and I together are just _so_ irresponsible like you all seem to think, she asked Marron to go with us. But now that _you're_ going she won't need to, so..." she trailed off.

"I. Am Going. To Murder You." Her brother growled. 

Bra reached out and pressed the button on the screen, disconnecting the inter-house call. She quickly reached up and kissed Vegeta on the cheek with that sticky, smelly gunk on her lips that stuck to his skin that he could never really yell at her for, though he'd like to. "Bye dad!" she said with a grin, and then ran towards his ever-open window of the master bedroom and took flight. 

He turned to watch her streak up through the sky, Trunks close behind yelling promises of death at her while she laughed. "Just ask her out already, you stupid boy!" she cackled after him, mocking his weakness like a pro.

Vegeta shook his head, but divested himself of the whole ridiculous debacle. He was sure some of the house servants heard, but they'd long ago become accustomed to the caustic language of love his family used to communicate their feelings. 

Vegeta could see now, having lived among humans for so long, that his family was quite bad at dealing with their tempers, with expressing themselves the a typical human way, with loving each other in a fashion that didn't absolutely terrify and bewilder anyone outside their little saiyan-human coven. 

And fine, you didn't have to twist his arm even to even admit it--

He loved every second.


End file.
